DHN2018 - an Analysis of a Digital Humanities Conference
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DHN2018 — an Analysis of a
Digital Humanities Conference
Eetu Mäkelä[0000−0002−8366−8414] and Mikko Tolonen[0000−0003−2892−8911]
HELDIG – Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities,
University of Helsinki, Finland
http://heldig.fi
firstname.lastname@helsinki.fi
Abstract. This article examines both the choices made, as well as the
data gathered during the construction of the programme for the DHN2018
conference. Through this, we shed light on 1) the general directions of DH
in the Nordic countries, 2) which DH traditions are particularly well rep-
resented here and 3) the pain points and surprising interactions identified
during the programme-curation process. We base our recommendations
to the organisers of future conferences on this analysis.
1 Introduction
There is no single digital humanities (DH). On the contrary, as a term its con-
tents are under constant, fervent negotiation [2,7,3]. As a result, on the global
level DH as a field is a complex landscape of partially overlapping domains [6],
including humanities computing, multimodal cultural heritage and digital cul-
ture studies, for example. Not all of these fields are connected, but they rather
form a landscape in which each camp has aspects in common with its neighbours,
who have things in common with their neighbours, and so on.
The tensions in such a structure become manifest in the defining and align-
ing of an institution’s digital humanities with those of others, and in conferences
convened under the general heading of “digital humanities”. The way such con-
ferences (including DHN2018) tend to deal with the problem is to explicitly
embrace the moniker of diversity, of ”big-tent digital humanities” [7].
In the broader scheme of things, this is not an unproductive decision. Con-
sider the landscape of the humanities in general, for example: it is full of research
traditions and approaches that are mutually incompatible. In this sense, DH acts
as a connector. Clearly, without DH, historical studies, linguistics and cultural
and area studies (the most frequent humanities backgrounds in DHN2018) could
not be part of the same conference in a sensible way.
At the same time, it is useful not only to acknowledge the diversity inside
the big tent, but also to chart it, and to think critically about one’s own position
within it. In the Nordic context, with our own brand of digital humanities just
emerging, this also opens up an active opportunity to affect how it will eventu-
ally solidify. It is an opportunity that extends beyond the DHN conference, asattempts at Nordic collaboration in developing DH infrastructures and teaching,
for example, go hand in hand with its development.
To this end, this article explores both the choices made in creating the pro-
gramme for DHN2018, as well as the data gathered during its construction. We
will shed light on 1) the general directions of DH in the Nordic countries, 2) which
DH traditions are particularly well represented and 3) the pain points and surpris-
ing interactions among the traditions identified during the programme-curation
process. We base our recommendations to the organisers of future conferences
on this analysis.
2 Nordic Strands of DH
Given the role of a general DH conference as a big tent filled with overlapping
camps, the themes for the call for papers were consciously chosen to serve as
the support pillars. These themes included History, Cultural Heritage, Games
and Future, selected to comply with local DH interests as well as current think-
ing about the DHN setting in an international context. To encourage mingling
among the camps, the four keynote speakers for the conference were invited on
the understanding that they would contribute to the interplay of these themes.
Open Science was selected as the overall unifying and reflective theme: although
distinct from DH, as an endeavour [1] it nonetheless resonates with many of its
strands, and as an entity parallels the notion that DH could act as a transfor-
mative force across the whole of the humanities1 .
Reflecting the selection of these themes, Figures 1 and 2 show the disciplines
and topics mentioned in the proposals received. Considered in light of the theme
distribution of the major international DH conference2 , they also illustrate the
specific composition of Nordic DH in contrast with the international average.
The top five humanities disciplines to which the proposals pertain are the same
for both conferences, but the order is different. The two most frequently used
keywords in DHN2018 are history and linguistics, compared with literary studies,
and library and information science in the international DH conference.
Among the topic keywords, on the other hand, cultural-heritage collections,
and galleries, libraries, archives and museums appear much more frequently in
the DHN2018 proposals. This highlights the interest and participation of cultural-
heritage institutions in DH as a particular feature shared among all Nordic
countries. Open data is also heavily represented, reflecting the overall theme.
New media, games and digital art are still more frequent, but generally remain on
the side-lines. This highlights the tension between DH as a historically technical
discipline as opposed to newer attempts to include the study of digital culture
within its remit.
Finally, data modelling and natural language processing both feature more
often than in the international DH conference. This reflects the strong computer-
1
See e.g. the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0, http://humanitiesblast.com/
manifesto/Manifesto_V2.pdf
2
http://scottbot.net/submissions-to-dh2017-pt-1/Fig. 1. Disciplines associated with proposals submitted to DHN 2018 Fig. 2. Topics associated with proposals submitted to DHN 2018
science and language-technology tradition here, but it also concerns conference
expectations in general.
3 A Clash of Traditions
As noted, people attending digital-humanities conferences come from differing
scholarly backgrounds. This is certainly true in the case of a regional conference
such as DHN, in which the barrier to entry has deliberately been kept low so
that people may attend just to find out what DH is and to see if they would be
interested in being part of it. These different scholarly traditions, it turns out,
project very different conceptions of what a conference is, and how a conference
programme ought to be curated.
These differences matter for two reasons. First, if the call for papers and the
reviewer instructions are not fully explicit about what is sought, the common-
ground fallacy / false-consensus effect [4] will ensure some level of confusion
among all participants. Striving for clarity in these instructions is something
we aimed at in DHN2018, but we ultimately failed. It is our hope that our
explanations of what we discovered about these traditions during the submission
and review process will help future organisers to be better prepared.
Even more importantly, however, these differences have practical implica-
tions that make a conference either attractive or unattractive to people from a
particular background. In other words, the choice of conference format can be
used actively to shape what DH in the Nordic countries ends up being.
Related to this, the biggest change in this year’s conference was to allow
the submission of a publication-ready text instead of an abstract, if so desired.
This was done in part to encourage participation from the fields of language
technology and computer science, where it is the norm. In these traditions, a
quality conference is a publication venue on a par with journals — people send
in publication-ready texts, which go through a thorough expert-led peer-review
process, and the resulting conference proceedings are valued as much as if not
more than journal publications.
This practice has practical consequences for DH conferences. For example,
many people conducting research in the fields of data science, human-computer
interaction and language technology do not consider the main international DH
conference an attractive forum because it does not publish citable proceedings.
Indeed, as previously mentioned, the proportion of language-technology propos-
als for DHN2018 exceeded that of the international DH conference. Interest-
ingly, of the 26 proposals submitted under this heading, 18 (69%) were sent as
publication-ready texts.
However, conference proceedings are not universally valued even within com-
puter science. Conferences in some traditions take in what is known as an ex-
tended abstract: essentially, a fully-formed text is submitted but what comes
out is not citable [5]. Indeed, the fact that the output is not formally published
is the key. In such cases the conference functions as a sounding board for the
authors, allowing them to improve the paper before journal submission.The focus of conferences in many humanities disciplines is even more strongly
on developing ongoing work. This work may well be nowhere near publication-
ready, thus an abstract is a more fitting submission format. What is discussed
at the conference is reworked into a special issue of a journal at a later point in
some fields, whereas in others it may only appear in monograph form years later.
Whatever the case, on the understanding that conferences deal with unfinished
work, conference proceedings may be actively frowned upon. PhD students of
history at the University of Cambridge in the early 2000s were specifically in-
structed never to publish work in such proceedings, for example, because it would
undermine their reputation as prospective scholars.
What makes matters even more complex is that the amount of peer review
for different types of submissions also varies by field and by conference. Some
people who submitted proposals to DHN2018 were surprised that there was peer
review at all. The shortest submitted abstract comprised two sentences, whereas
some long ones resembled publication-ready texts in both length and form.
Analysis of the dataset of proposals and their reviews also gives statistical sup-
port to the argument that abstract-oriented traditions focus less on finished work.
A two-sample t-test conducted between the review scores for the two proposal
categories produced weak evidence of an association between publication-ready
texts and better presentation and overall scores (p~0.1, meaning a ~10% likeli-
hood of this happening merely due to random chance). However, with regard to
a better quality-of-content score, the evidence was very strong (p~0.005).
What all this means is that organisers of DH conferences should carefully
think through and balance these different traditions. At the same time, they
should actively think where they wish to end up on the spectrum, taking small
steps to move the coalescing tradition in the right direction.
With respect to DHN, we would like the tradition to move towards that of
computer science in some respects, with submitted texts containing the finished
work instead of an abstract. This is not incompatible with the notion of confer-
ences as a platform for developing ongoing work. In fact, this is often explicitly
encoded in the proposal types in computer-science conferences. Full papers are
expected to be between eight and 16 pages in length, and to report on ready
research. Short papers, on the other hand, are between four and eight pages
long, and report on intermediate results from ongoing work. The final category
of between two and four publication-ready pages for posters is something even
those just starting projects should be able to write. This does shift the focus of
conferences to the publication-ready side of the spectrum. To counteract this in
the interests of the major group affected, some conferences also host a doctoral
consortium in which doctoral students can practise presenting their work in a
talk, and at the same time gain exposure to the wider conference as a whole.
Of necessity, any transition in this direction will need to be long, given that
only 57 of the 160 proposals (36%) in 2018 were submitted as publication-ready
texts. Moreover, it should not happen before the Nordic DH field has further coa-
lesced. At present, it is much more important to be inclusive of the different tradi-tions, which is easily facilitated by keeping the abstract and citable-proceedings
tracks in parallel.
4 Regional Directions in DH
In terms of participation, DHN2018 represents a significant growth for the com-
munity, with a 90-per-cent increase in proposals as well as accepted presenta-
tions, and a 60-per-cent increase in participation (Table 1).
Table 1. Number of participants in the DHN conferences
Conference Proposals Presentations Posters % Returning Participants
2016, Oslo 125 79 13 220
2017, Gothenburg 100 61 15 15% 191
2018, Helsinki 186 116 37 32% 310
However, more in-depth scrutiny of the statistics (Table 2 showing absolute
numbers and Table 3 showing proportions) reveals differing patterns among the
participating countries. Alarmingly, the relative proportions of both Norwegian
and Danish participants have dwindled, in terms of both presentations and at-
tendance. At the same time, the proportion of Swedish participants is holding
fairly steady, balancing a moderate increase in the absolute number of proposal
writers, with a moderate decrease in participation.
Table 2. Number of participants in the DHN conferences by country.
DK=Danish, FI=Finnish, NO=Norwegian, and SE=Swedish. Pr=Proposal authors,
Pa=Participants
Conference DKPr DKPa FIPr FIPa NoPr NOPa SEPr SEPa
2016, Oslo 14 34 21 41 35 73 30 52
2017, Gothenburg 21 30 47 30 12 21 40 59
2018, Helsinki 14 19 124 160 13 14 55 43
Table 3. Proportion of participants in the DHN conferences by country
Conference DKPr DKPa FIPr FIPa NoPr NOPa SEPr SEPa
2016, Oslo 11% 15% 16% 19% 28% 33% 25% 24%
2017, Gothenburg 13% 11% 28% 15% 7% 11% 24% 31%
2018, Helsinki 5% 6% 41% 50% 4% 5% 18% 14%
Making up most of the overall increase are thus the Finns. Much of this is,
of course, natural in 2018 when the conference was hosted in Helsinki. However,the trend appeared earlier. Upon further analysis, what seems to be happening
here could be a direct effect of science policy: in March 2015 the Academy of
Finland published a special call for funding digital humanities projects 3 . In
addition, in November 2015 the University of Helsinki put in a 10-million-euro
application to the Academy for profiling funding for digital humanities. This may
have provided a significant incentive for Finnish organisations to send delegates
to the 2016 Oslo inaugural DHN conference just to test the waters. For the Oslo
conference, for example, the Finnish Association for Scholarly Publishing funded
the participation of 10 applicants. Various memory organisations in Finland,
including the National Library, the National Archives, SLS and SKS, have also
been active in promoting the participation of their employees in the three DHN
conferences thus far. All in all, 19 per cent of the participants in Oslo were
Finnish, as opposed to only 16 per cent of the proposal authors. This further
indicates that a significant proportion of people are travelling to and attending
the conference without giving a presentation.
Even more interestingly, this dynamic was reversed in Gothenburg 2017,
with a whopping 28 per cent of the papers involving a Finnish author, whereas
the proportion of Finnish participants stayed at 15 per cent. This may indi-
cate a phenomenon in which knowledge of the Academy programme and the 10
million euros of profiling funding granted in March 2016 had trickled down to
Finnish researchers who, realising that what they had been doing already could
be branded as digital humanities, used accepted proposals as leverage to obtain
travel funding to attend the conference.
As mentioned above, it is natural that Finnish participation grew further in
2018 when the conference was in Finland. However, the fact that 41 per cent
of the authors of papers and 50 per cent of the participants were Finnish is a
worrisome statistic for anyone striving for a pan-Nordic balance. At the same
time, there are encouraging signs. Apart from the relative stability of Swedish
participation overall, a closer look at returning authors reveals a community
coalescing with less skewed participation. Of a total of 54 authors returning from
2017, four are Norwegian, seven are Danish, 17 are Swedish and 19 are Finnish.
This aligns with the statistics from the previous year, when of the 19 returning
authors, eight were Finnish, six were Swedish and two were Norwegian. Still,
the small proportion of Norwegian and Danish participants remains a worrisome
puzzle for the future — although much more will be known about this after the
conference in Copenhagen in 2019.
Going beyond the directions of the four biggest Nordic countries, organisers
of the 2018 conference also tried to use the location to expand across the Baltic.
To an extent, this was successful, with nine delegates arriving from Estonia and
six from Latvia.
3
http://www.aka.fi/globalassets/32akatemiaohjelmat/digihum/
ohjelmamuistio_digihum_en_final.pdf5 The Future
In our opinion, the annual DHN conference will fulfil several important roles in
the future.
First, it will develop into the central platform to showcase what is being done,
and to develop new ideas related to DH in the Nordic countries. Second, it will
act as a catalyst for new kinds of collaboration between researchers and memory
organisations on the one hand, and among language technology, computer science
and the humanities on the other. If successful, both of these outcomes will also
have an impact beyond the Nordic countries. At the same time, this kind of cross-
fertilisation will continue to bring new research questions to the conference.
DHN can and should also develop into new areas, including summer schools
and other activities to develop training and competences. This branching out will
help solidify the particular Nordic brand of digital humanities, which rests on the
core Nordic strengths and values of co-operation, planning and infrastructural
support. The workshops dedicated to sharing resources and best practices on
teaching, co-located with the DHN conferences, constitute a prime example of
this. Another good example is the development of shared DH data-management
and computational resources.
Infrastructural developments going hand in hand with DHN will play an im-
portant role in all of these developments. One important argument related to
this is that it will probably be necessary in the future, even for individual appli-
cations (such as ERC grants), to position the project as benefiting from available
research infrastructures, into which the EU has already poured significant funds.
With CLARIN and DARIAH being the landmark ERICs in the humanities, it is
imperative to ensure strong Nordic co-operation within these organisations. At
present, most Nordic countries are connected to CLARIN, but only Denmark
has also joined DARIAH. As the Nordic dimension of DARIAH is developing
virtually alongside DHN (explorations for a Nordic Hub for DARIAH have been
ongoing since 2015), it would seem natural for these approaches to continue to
further evolve in unison.
Acknowledgements We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer and Mark
J. Hill for their helpful comments and criticism.
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